The Chairman of the Governing Council of the International Institute of Information Technology, Dr. Raj Reddy, announced the appointment of Dr. Rajeev Sangal as the new Director of the Institute in the sixth meeting of the council on 18th March 2002. Dr. Rajeev Sangal takes over the reins from Dr. Narendra Ahuja who has directed the institute since its inception.

Dr. Sangal received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980 in Computer and Information Sciences. His research is in the areas of Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation, Speech processing and Artificial Intelligence. His research accomplishments include anusaaraka machine translation system for 5 pairs of Indian languages, a computational Paninian framework, detection of the language of unknown text, semi-automatic generation of font converters, and information extraction from text. He has so far served as the Director of the institute’s Language Technologies Research Centre. Prior to joining the institute, he was a professor of computer science at IIT Kanpur and a research staff member at the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT, Cambridge, USA. Dr. Sangal has coauthored three books and numerous technical papers.

Dr. Ahuja, Donald Biggar Willet Chaired Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Chair of Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, becomes the first Director International of the institute. In his new focused role, he will concentrate on long term planning for the institute, aimed at further enhancing the societal relevance and impact of the institute which have been the central themes guiding the institute’s design and growth. Dr. Ahuja will advise the Director on matters concerning new research and teaching programs, faculty recruitment and retention, external relations and collaborations, and technology transfer and commercialisation. His research areas include computer vision, image processing, sensors, human computer interaction, robotics and parallel algorithms.